Transfers

This week started a little rough, to say the least, I feel as if I lost my best friend. We had transfers and Elder Barney was shipped off to another location and I got myself a new companion. Elder Barney and I got along so well and I have never had so much fun on the mission then when I was with Elder Barney. He will be missed.

This week has been a week of lots of prayer. I am a senior companion now in an area that has taking a spin for the worst. We had to drop all of our investigators because they were not progressing and my new companion, who is 2 months younger in the mission than me, doesn´t speak a lick of spanish. So I have felt a little overwhelmed.  We have just been doing contacts on the street and I´ve already had to sit my new companion down twice and tell him what is up. He is a good missionary, but he believes himself to be a miracle worker because he had so much success in his last area. But I have felt very overwhelmed this past week. All I have is hope that everything will get better.

Nothing too crazy has happened lately, just talking with lots of people,

Oh, just thought of a story to tell.

We looked through the area book and found a lady we wanted to visit. We get to her house, and surprisingly, she lets us in to chat. We start talking and she says that she is Atheist and doesn´t believe in anything. But We were friendly(well actually, this is all I, because as previously stated, my new comp doesn´t understand or speak any spanish) and I asked her some questions to get to know her better and to figure out her doubts.

She said that If I could answer this ONE doubt she had, then she would be baptized and be a faithful member of the church, I asked what her question was and prayed for the words to answer this lady´s question. I figured it would be super deep or about something she had heard about the church but I was excited to hear the question. She said "Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden and then they had their sons Cain and Abel. Cain killed his brother and was then cast out to another land. The bible says that Cain met his wife while he was in  the other land. So how is it possible for Cain to have met a wife in another land if Cain and Abel were Adam and Eve´s first sons?!"

Seriously....But anyways, I asked her the question "Do you know how many years Adam lived for? she said "About a 1000 or so" and then I asked, "How many children do you think he could have had in 1000 years?" She laughed and said "A whole house full I suppose"

So then I said, "out of that "whole house full" don´t you think that Cain would have gotten his wife out of the hundreds of children Adam probably had during his 1000 years on earth?" She didn´t answer and said, that’s the exact same thing the last missionaries started saying! But I just can´t believe it!"

She shared all her doubts and we tried to explain but she just wouldn´t hear it. So We (I) invited her to pray about her doubt with Cain and Abel with an open heart and that she could know the truth.

It was an interesting meeting to say the least.

Well that’s about it for now.

¡Os quiero mucho!

Jason

I had no idea what to say!

This week was a little uneventful, but it was the last week of the transfer, and my companion elder barney is headed out to another area while I will be staying here.

I believe I mentioned last week that we are fresh out of investigators and we are searching and searching for more people to start teaching. This past week, I did more contacting (speaking with people on the street) than I have for my entire mission! It was tough, and hardly anyone gave us the time of day, but we did receive 8 phone numbers of people who could potentially be interested. So we are excited about that but we will see!

Oh, At the specialized training, we got DVD players! Sweet huh! It is cool to see that missionary work, and the church even, is using technology to adapt its teachings to what is going on in the world. Because of this, I think I´ve watched the Restoration video about once a day and just about have it memorized!

I believe it was this past Friday that we were walking past our chapel on our way home for the night. We saw the door open and some of the lights on and we freaked out a bit because we were the last ones in there and nobody had meetings there. Also for a fun fact, our chapel is in the roughest part of town, so that added to our freaking out. Come to find out, the bishopric and their wives were all having a little dinner meeting there. They invited us to come over and they gave us some nasty seafood pizza. Fish. I just don´t get it. But of course, we ate it. Upon our arrival we found out that they had been arguing about a marital topic. They all turned to us and said, lets see what the missionaries have to say about this. My companion, who is apparently much quicker on his feet, got up and said he was REALLY thirsty and went to the kitchen to get some water. So there I was, with six good members asking me about how I felt on this topic about marriage. Shoot, I had no idea what to say! But the topic was a little sketchy and it came from one of the members who we have some suspicions about anyways. But this quote came almost immediately to my mind. I had read it before my mission and I hadn´t really thought about it sense. But I told them "If you don´t want temptation to follow you, don´t act like you are interested." I acted as if I thought of it on the spot and they were taken a little aback and appeared to think "wow, this guy is deep." But they seemed to like the advise and their conversation continued.

But really, I think it is so interesting how the members, even those who have served missions, think that the missionaries have all the answers.

On that note, Saturday night, we got a call and they asked me to speak in Sacrament. I think that was talk number 3 since I´ve been here. But I really do like giving talks. They have a whole new appeal to me now.

I feel that I´m just kind of ranting now, so I guess I will close.

I´m doing great in my little pueblo of Alcalá de Guadaíra and I look forward to another exciting week!

Os quiro,

Jason

in front of a large pile of empty beer cans and a pamphlet for the word of wisdom

at the "El Campo de Real Betis" the local profession soccer team


My companion, Elder Barney and I with Gracia and Copi. She is by far my favorite member in our ward. She cracks me up. She is hilarious.

A Story

I always feel that it is a little presumptuous for a missionary to send home a sermon, but this story hit me pretty hard and I would like to share it. Yesterday, we had stake conference and the Temple president from Madrid came and he gave this talk. I was actually zoned out by this point because the meeting had already been an hour and a half(And it was all in Spanish! I have a hard enough time paying attention in English!) so when my companion asked me what I thought about it afterwards, I had no idea what he was talking about. haha, so he told me the jist of the story and I re wrote it in my own words last night into my journal. So here is the story and commentary in my own words taken out of my journal.

"There was once a supply depot that was located very far away from the stores of which it supplied. An order came in from one of the stores and they requested an order of 2 items: Sponges and logs of firewood. The owner of the warehouse loaded up two horses, one with the light weight of the sponges and the other carried the full weight of the wooden logs. The long journey began and as time passed, the horse carrying the logs began to show its decrease in strength and symptoms of fatigue. However the other horse, was the complete contrary, he had hardly been effected by the weight of his cargo. The horse with the wieght of the logs was forced to walk in a strait path while the other walked, trotted, galloped and ran around as freely as he willed. After much time had passed and a lot of distance covered, the caravan was stopped at the bank of a river. At this point, the horse with the logs was shaking and sweating because of the burden he carried while the horse with the sponges walked unaffected. The travelers had to cross the river so the horses entered the water began to swim across. As the horse with the sponges crossed, he quickly realized that the weight of his cargo was dramatically increasing. The sponges absorbed the water and the weight became unbearable. The once free roaming horse with this light load could not keep above the water due to the extreme weight of his now soaked through sponges, and then, he drowned. As for the other horse, the one who had carried the heavier load now found that his load of wooden logs was helping him stay afloat and carried him to the opposite bank of the river.
Often times, we view obedience to the Gospel as a burden weighing us down. We see keeping the commandments as a means of limiting our freedom. We witness our friends and even loved ones participating and choosing to do whatsoever they please, while we are pushed down by the weight of obedience. But this is not so. It is our obedience to the gospel, holding to the rod, that will keep us afloat when adversity comes. The wonderful thing about all this is that, unlike the horses, we can choose which "burden" we want to carry. We can take a burden of light sponges through our journey of life and do as we please, but when we have to cross the river, when that last day comes, we will not be able to support the weight, and we will drown. OR we can choose the path less traveled and walk in obedience.. We will still have our opportunities to lean, grow and progress, but at the river, it will be our obedience to the commandments of God that will carry us safely across the dangerous waters and help us finish the task we initially started out to do. Remember, the horse with the sponges did not fulfill his purpose of delivering his cargo.

So the choice seems very clear, we can walk, trot, gallop or run in a path of our own design, but drown at the end, or we can put ourselves on a strait and narrow path that was designed before the world was and be carried to safety."

ok that took me way to long too write so I´ll briefly explain what we did for the week.

We dropped everyone. All of our investigators are not progressing, all 6 of them, so we met with them and asked where we were going. They all had baptismal dates but they said they no longer have interest in continuing with the lessons. So it is back to the grind for us. We don´t have any investigators but we are actively looking for more! We found out recently that we have 263 registered members here in Alcalá but only 60 of them are active. So we are out on the search for these less actives!

Last Pday, we went to the Oldest Bull fighting stadium in Spain and took a tour. It was way cool! I really want to see a bull fight now!

Today we are going to have a relaxing Pday and stay in Alcalá. But we will probably go bowling. Love bowling.

But that is about it for me!

Os quiro!

Jason

The Formula for Work

Here's my week:

The formula for Work, as far as I remember, is Work = Force x Distance. I figured out this week that this formula for the physical nature of things, does not necessarily apply to the spiritual nature of things. This past week, the amount of work we put in did not equal the force we applied on our commitments to investigators, nor the distance we walked. What a bummer. But we continue to work, regardless of faulty equations and we are hoping to see some results relatively soon.

This past Sunday, we got to participate in the circle in ordaining Pepe to the office of a priest in the Aaronic Priesthood. This guys is such a stud. He just eats up the gospel. But afterwards, he was all smiles and gave big hugs to each of us. It was great to see.

This past week we had a list of Less active families to go and visit. We went from address to address trying to get in with them but most of them said no. However, one elderly man said, "sure come on back tomorrow and we can talk". So we returned the next day and were prepared to get this guy re-activitated. He was very elderly and as he showed us his house, we asked him who were in the pictures on the wall. He said he had no idea. But the pictures were clearly of him and family or friends. So right there we knew something wasn´t all there in terms of memory. We asked him when he was baptized and he said, I don´t remember, I think when I was a baby. But we proceeded to have the lesson targeted for a less active member. He said he wasn´t a member of the Church and didn´t have an idea what the Book of Mormon was, but we kept talking to him about it trying to refresh his memory. We were convinced that he was this less active man and that he had just forgotten. We finished our lesson and this whole time, we had been calling him Rafael, the name we had with this address, but as we were leaving he told us, why were you calling me Rafael? My name is Paco. Turns out Paco was telling us the truth, he wasn´t a member nor a less active member. And apparently the less active member who lived there had moved quite some time ago. However he told us that we were very nice and that we could stop by anytime if we had a moment. It was a funny experience.

I don´t have too much else to discuss for this past week. Our 3 baptismal dates got dropped by all 3 of our investigators and so it is back to the grind. We are fasting and praying to find more people to teach and invite to come unto Christ.

Os Quiro,

Jason